5 X Friday: BA Alum Andrew Nath

Our series of interviews with department faculty, students and alums continues with Andrew Nath (BA 1991), Executive Vice President at the Premier Bank in Maplewood, an 850 million dollar bank. The best part of his job? "Interacting with people to determine the issues that need resolution and working within a creative environment to solve those issues." Nath has high school-age children looking at colleges, and he says he's advocating for the U. More . . .

English Stars in 10-25 Minnesota Daily

The Minnesota Daily newspaper's October 25 issue contains two feature articles with English connections. CLA Winton Chair Nuruddin Farah, hosted by English, is interviewed about his latest novel Crossbones and its backdrop of Somali turmoil; Farah is reading from the novel, released next week in paperback, Monday October 29 at 7 pm at the Loft Literary Center. PhD candidate Bomi Yoon graces the front page of the Daily--and is interviewed inside about her participation in the production "Under My Skin: Asian American Student Stories" performed Friday and Saturday October 26-27, 7:30 pm, in the Nolte Xperimental Theatre at Rarig. Recent BA alumnae Naomi Ko and Audrey Park are also interviewed for the story. The production is directed by Rick Shiomi, the artistic director of the award-winning Asian-American theater company Mu Performing Arts.

5 X Friday: Professor Paula Rabinowitz

Professor Paula Rabinowitz stars in our third installment of 5 X Friday, in which we pose five questions to Department of English alumnae/i, faculty, and students. Professor Rabinowitz has been instrumental in bringing Australian National University scholar Ruth Barraclough to speak Monday, October 22, about the image of the factory girl in Korean literature. And Rabinowitz last summer published, with co-editor Cristina Giorcelli, Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II (University of Minnesota Press), part of a four-volume series deciphering how clothing and accessories offer cultural, political, and social meanings. More . . .

1. This summer you published the second volume in your University of Minnesota series on clothing, Habits of Being, which you edit with Italian literary scholar Cristina Giorcelli. Can you talk about the article of yours included in it?
This one is on the covers of lesbian pulp novels and why everyone always has to wear a slip in them ["Slips of the Tongue: Lesbian Pulp Fiction as How-to-Dress Manuals"]. I did research into the role of these books in the forging of an early lesbian subjectivity and culture. But also I found material on lesbian breast-binding in the 1950s and the underwear people were wearing, butch and femme underwear, so . . . you always learn something.
2. This volume also includes an essay by a former advisee, Katalin Medvedev, called "It Is a Garage Sale at Savers Every Day: An Ethnography of the Savers Thrift Department Store in Minneapolis." Medvedev, now an associate professor at the University of Georgia, earned an Apparel PhD at the U. How did you end up directing a dissertation for the College of Design?
Katalin was a professor in Hungary of Russian Literature and a quite famous radio journalist. She decided to get a PhD in women's studies and came to work with me. Then she figured out that it was easier to get a job with a PhD in design than in women's studies. So she redid her prelims and insisted that I remain her dissertation chair, along with Apparel Professor Emerita Joanne Eicher.
She is a dress historian. Her dissertation is on the use of clothing by women during the Soviet period, communist rule in Hungary, and how women subverted the constraints on them. For instance, dye lots were not the same, so in a matching outfit the skirt would be made in Poland and the jacket in East Germany, and they didn't have the same dye lot so the greens would never match. She interviewed all these women about how they redecorated their clothing. It's clothing as a site of semiotic and political dissent and discourse.
Most of the clothes that were owned by these people were burned when Hungary opened up. Apparently there's like five [communist-era] bras left in Hungary, and they're in museums--it's material culture, and it's been wiped out. A lot of her work is looking at news film to see what they were wearing. She's top-notch.
3. Didn't you have other students from Eastern Europe at that time?
Masha [Zavialova, PhD 2008] and Anca [Parvulescu, PhD 2006]; they were this cohort of brilliant women who were my students, so-called . . . all of whom knew way more than I did about everything. Anca was the Romanian translator of Gloria Steinem; Masha translated Alice Walker into Russian. They all ended up in a seminar I was teaching about materialist feminist theory. Basically what they started working on in that class became their dissertations.
4. You got an Imagine grant to bring Ruth Barraclough from Australia to speak next Tuesday Oct 22: what's your connection with her?
She had a post-doc in History and Asian Language and Literature here a few years ago and is a scholar of Korean working-class women's history. She has a terrific new book out, Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence and Representation in Industrializing Korea (University of California).
She's one of my co-editors on this project, called Sex Text Comrades, on what's called "red love": the part of the Communist Party that people forget about, which was that it was very sexually risqué in the early times. In fact the communists were supportive of gay rights and abortion in the years before Stalin clamped down. And that was central to the story of modernism and modern female experience.
And then there's the global spread of proletarian writing amongst women, which is based not on 1920s communism but rather on the very different temporalities as different nations industrialized. In Korea, women didn't start working in factories until the 1970s, but it's the same story as my story about the women in America in the 1930s [Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America]. So we have scholars from all these different countries thinking about the connection between desire and proletarianism.
Fifty Shades of Red Love? You just need a good book cover.
That's easy; I have 400 of them.
5. ?
I'm working on a monograph called American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street for Princeton. In a way, that pulp fiction lesbian article was the beginning of this project. It's kind of a sequel to my noir book [Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism]. It's about the paperback revolution and the circulation of high culture as trash--in the way that Faulkner became marketed as a sex novelist after Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road was such a big hit, and they turned all these Southern authors into steamy sex writers. You have to come to my office and see these paperbacks . . . .
Alums, send us your story! Share your announcements, awards, and news.
For other 5 X Friday interviews, go to our home page.

5 X Friday: BA Alum Esther Porter

Here's our second installment of 5 X Friday: quick interviews with Department of English alumnae/i, faculty, students, and staff. Five questions (with answers!) posted on Fridays. Email sutt0063@umn.edu if you have comments. This week's subject is Esther Porter (BA summa cum laude, 2005), a former publicist for Coffee House Press who is now freelance editing. This fall she helped launch a new literary magazine, Revolver. More . . .

Kent Bales 1936-2012

We are saddened to report the October 8th passing of Professor Emeritus Kent Bales, who served the Department of English for 41 years until his retirement in 2008. A graduate of Yale (BA) and Berkeley (PhD), Bales joined the English faculty in 1967 and went on to chair the department twice, as well as direct both undergraduate and graduate studies. He also served as chair of both the University's Senate Joint Committee on Faculty Affairs and Senate Joint Committee on Faculty Appointments. A scholar of American literature, he was well-known for his writing on Hawthorne. He is survived by his wife, Maria; daughter Liza (David) Lee and son Tom (Tiziana) Bales, five grandchildren and many other loving family members and good friends. A private celebration of his life will be held in the coming weeks. Memorials preferred to the Alzheimer's Association or the Sierra Club.

5 X Friday: PhD Alum Gerald Jay Goldberg

Today we initiate a new weekly series, 5 X Friday: quick interviews with Department of English alumnae/i, faculty, students, and staff. Yes, there are five questions. And interviews will be posted on Fridays. Easy! Email sutt0063@umn.edu if you have comments. Our first subject is Gerald Jay Goldberg (PhD 1958), who published his first book in 1962, and followed with eight more titles. In this his 83rd year, he authored a suspense/adventure novel with Nan Talese/Doubleday. We caught up him with him via email. More . . .

BA Alum Wins Major Poetry Prize

The Academy of American Poets has announced the winners of its annual major prizes, and David Wojahn (BA 1976) has been awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which honors the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year. Of Wojahn's 2011 collection World Tree (University of Pittsburgh), judge Linda Gregerson noted: "Exquisitely cadenced, politically astute, large of heart, and keen of mind, these are poems of extraordinary moral penetration. They are also a joy to read." Wojahn will receive $25,000. The other judges were David St. John and current U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. Wojahn is a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and serves as a member of the program faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of the Fine Arts. World Tree represents his eighth collection of poetry. He studied with Michael Dennis Browne while at the University of Minnesota.